Video Games May Be ‘The Future’ of South Park

An interview with South Park series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker hints that games like South Park: The Fractured But Whole could be the future of the franchise.

After a rather inauspicious start in the video game industry with the South Park first-person shooter released in 1998, Matt Stone and Trey Parker have managed to carve out a niche for their foul-mouthed cartoon children in an unexpected genre. South Park the television series has stayed relevant because of how malleable it can be, but few fans could have predicted that the best home for a South Park game would be in the form of an RPG as South Park: The Stick of Truth.

Somehow, however, the idea of Cartman in a wizard hat wielding a tree branch and live action roleplaying with his friends captured the imaginations of gaming audiences everywhere, and now Ubisoft is producing a sequel that spoofs the super hero genre in South Park: The Fractured But Whole. A recent interview with series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, conducted by Entertainment Weekly, revealed that the potency of the video game industry is not lost on Parker:

“We also know that this [South Park: The Fractured But Whole] might be the future of South Park. This might be where things are going.”

That statement could certainly hold true if audiences are as responsive to the gameplay footage demonstrated in the South Park: The Fractured But Whole E3 2016 trailer as they were to the previous game’s turn-based combat. Stone and Parker are no strangers to the idea of blending their television property with the burgeoning video game industry, either – South Park has featured PewDiePie, the famous YouTube Let’s Play star, a couple of times already.

Of course, the duo still plans on proceeding with doing “semi-serialization for the rest of [South Park]” on television, and they also suggested in the interview that the creators almost decided to do another movie instead of a video game sequel. There are still some kinks that need ironing out if South Park is going to embrace a future of video game content as well, like South Park: The Stick of Truth‘s struggles with censorship in certain countries.

True to form, Stone and Parker also left a tantalizing prospect dangling in front of fans at the end of the interview. When the interviewer prompted both men with “South Park VR in 2018?”, Stone simply replied that gamers will “take [their] South Park pill”. What that means is anyone’s guess, but getting relentlessly ripped on by Cartman in glorious virtual reality sounds like a truly beautiful future if it happens.

What do you think about Stone and Parker’s stance on the importance of the video game industry? Would you like to see South Park games become a more regular occurrence? Let us know in the comments below.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole will be available for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on December 6, 2016.